Feynman, Richard Phillips (1918–1988)

Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics
with Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga
(1906–1979) for their independent work on quantum
electrodynamics. He also realized, independently of Murray Gell-Mann,
that protons, neutrons, and other hadrons must be composed of smaller particles, which he called 'partons'. Later, it was recognized that Feynman's partons and Gell-Mann's quarks (together with gluons) were effectively the same thing, but arrived at by different methods.

Feynman helped to develop the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project,
before going to Cornell University with Hans Bethe where he began his great work on quantum electrodynamics. He was professor
of physics at the California Institute of Technology from 1950 until his
death. With Gell-Mann, he developed a theory of weak interactions (see weak
force), such as those that occur in the emission of electrons from radioactive
nuclei. His invention of Feynman diagrams greatly facilitated theoretical work on elementary particles and their interactions.
In 1986 he was a key member of the committee that investigated the Challenger space shuttle disaster.